Cirrus@Austlit

'Pioneer Eliza Hawkins blazed a trail across the Blue Mountains. Sydney journalist Louise Mack moved to Tuscany and enjoyed a steamy affair with Italy's leading writer. As the world's first female war correspondent she reported the German invasion of Belgium for The Daily Mail, Louise narrowly escaped being shot as a spy and returned to Sydney.

Sister Ann Donnell risked her life to save Gallipoli victims in a field hospital on the island of Lemnos.

Beautiful, wild and wealthy, Nell Tritton became the lover and second wife of Alexander Kerensky, former Prime Minister of Russia. Nell foiled attempts by Stalin to assassinate her husband and drove him to freedom when the Nazis invaded Paris.

Melbourne artist Hilda Rix Nicholas had a five day honeymoon before her husband was killed fighting the Germans in France. Hilda had two landmark exhibitions in Paris before returning to Australia, marrying again and moving to the Monaro.

Mary Gaunt explored the remote jungles of West Africa with a team of naked warriors carrying her baggage. Two years later, in 1913 she spent six months in Peking, in an era before China had proper roads, journeying by mule cart from Peking to the Gobi desert and wrote three books about her adventures.

Margaret Ogg and Vida Goldstein were jeered in the 1890s when they claimed women were clever enough to get into Parliament.

It took 50 years before Enid Lyons, widowed mother of twelve, was made Australia's first Cabinet Minister and her struggles to hold office are compared with the career of Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, and Quentin Bryce, mother of five and our first female Governor-General.' (Publisher's blurb)

'This is the story of the lives of 11 significant women who sailed to the colonies in Australia's founding years.

'The first to arrive was Esther Abrahams, an attractive 16-year-old Jewish girl transported for shoplifting two cards of lace. Esther and other female convicts landed on 'the fatal shore' in a storm and she and many other female convicts were set upon by sex-starved men who had been awaiting their arrival for two weeks. Esther survived and under her own name became a wealthy cattle farmer.

'Pioneer sheep farmers Elizabeth Macarthur and Eliza Forlonge were bitter rivals to own the best breed of merino sheep. Like a character in a Jane Austen novel, witty, artistic Fanny Macleay lacked a dowry at a time when marriage was a young woman's main aim. Fanny's ambitious mother urged her six daughters to marry for money, but strong-minded Fanny had ideas of her own.

'In South Australia Mary Thomas, faced deprivation and despair as she struggled to give her children a better life. Irish Catholic Annie Mooney Caldwell came to South Australia as an indentured servant before becoming a 'dungaree settler' on a small block of land with a poor water supply. As a widow with a young family Annie became Australia's 'Mother Courage' undertaking a dangerous journey in a covered wagon from South Australia's Adelaide Hills many hundreds of miles to New South Wales.

'Van Diemen's Land punished and persecuted convicts and decimated the Aboriginal population. Louisa Meredith, wife of Tasmanian settler Charles Meredith faced a life of deprivation with courage. So did the aristocratic Georgiana McCrea who had to live in a wooden shack surrounded by mud and mire on Lonsdale Street in the centre of Melbourne before the roads were paved.

'Landing at Western Australia's Swan River Settlement, Mary Anne Friend had to camp on the edge of the Swan River surrounded by distraught settlers facing starvation as their crops withered and died. Mary Anne and her husband sailed away to Tasmania but the stress of a court case caused Mary Anne's premature death.

'Mary Anna Spencer was a distant cousin of the Spencers of Althorp House, the dynasty that would eventually produce Lady Diana Spencer, (Princess of Wales). In 1848 Mary Anna rumbled through the Queensland outback in a covered wagon where her father took up a pastoral property. Her English cousins had lives of luxury while Mary Anna lived in a bark hut and helped muster cattle.

'Letters and portraits help bring these women to life and describe the dangers and deprivations of pioneering in the six colonies that would unite at Federation to form one nation - Australia.

'These tales of women triumphing over adversity document the early decades of a nation and are told with great panache by Susanna de Vries who has inherited the Irish gift for storytelling. (From the publisher's website.)